Adjunct Professor of Anthropology

Education

M.D.

Ph.D.

A mummy of an Egyptian woman dating back to 700 A.D. has been scanned and stripped to reveal a tattoo on her thigh that displays the name of the biblical archangel Michael.

The discovery, announced by researchers at the British Museum over the weekend, was made during a research project that used advanced medical scans, including Computed Tomography (CT) images, to examine Egyptian mummies at a number of hospitals in the United Kingdom last year.

The woman's body was wrapped in a woolen and linen cloth before burial, and her remains were mummified in the desert heat.
As deciphered by curators, the tattoo on her thigh, written in ancient Greek, reads ???a??, transliterated as M-I-X-A-H-A, or Michael.

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"Placing the name on the inner thigh, as with this mummy, may have had some meaning for the hopes of childbirth or protection against sexual violation, as in 'This body is claimed and protected.' Michael is an obvious identity for a tattoo, as this is the most powerful of angels."

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Villanova University biology professor Michael Zimmerman, who also has used advanced technologies to study Egyptian mummies, said this kind of find has been sought for years.

"I did participate in an expedition to the Dakhleh Oasis in Egypt's western desert several years ago," he told FoxNews.com.

Dr. Zimmerman is Adjunct Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, Adjunct Professor of Biology at Villanova University, USA, and Visiting Professor at the KNH Centre for Biomedical Egyptology, The University of Manchester, where he has donated his collection of mummy material and teaches a palaeopathology course.

He is a collaborator on a Wellcome Trust funded research project by the KNH Centre and the Natural History Museum, London: Sir Grafton Elliot Smith and the Archaeological Survey of Nubia: their significance to the palaeopathological tradition.

His most recent publication is: David, AR and MR Zimmerman.
2010. Cancer: A new disease, an old disease, or something in between?
Nature Reviews Cancer, 10:728-733.
Invited paper.

PUBLIC LECTURE

Michael R. Zimmerman, M.D., Ph.D.The Natural History Museum, London on 28th August 2012

"In a frozen state, the fluids in the body simply evaporate," Michael Zimmerman, an anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert on mummification, explained to me. "The process is called sublimation.
It's the change from the solid state to a gaseous state without going through a liquid state.
If you put a tray of ice cubes in your freezer and go back two weeks later, they're a lot smaller.
That's what we're talking about.
Zimmerman estimated that the Longyearbyen seven, if they had been properly buried, would probably be down to about half their original weight, and maybe even less, so that their skin would be stretched tight over their bones, and every one of their ribs would be showing, as if they had been deprived of food for an extended period.
"The eyes collapse, because there is a large fat pad behind the eye that's mostly water, and when that dries the eye falls back into the socket," he said.
"Like everything else, the lips will tend to retract, so the teeth will become more prominent.
Nonetheless, Zimmerman thought that a full autopsy would still be possible.
"I don't see a problem," he went on, "especially given that these bodies were buried only about eighty years ago.